Content as an API – Mozilla Developer Network

Mozilla is an organisation that always seems to be doing innovative things with their documentation. One of the experimental functions it has introduced to its Kuma wiki platform for the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) documentation is an experimental PUT API that makes it possible to create and update articles remotely.

Mozilla suggests a number of ways it can be used:

You can create a page for your project and update content in certain sections from automated build, testing, and deployment scripts. This can help you keep your community up to date with your project’s progress.

If your project offers documentation alongside source code, you can push HTML renderings into a subsection of MDN. This lets you maintain docs in a way that’s appropriate for your team’s workflow, while still contributing to MDN and allowing localizers to translate the content.

Fro example, Mozilla’s programmers are able to write scripts that automatically generate articles based on contents of header files they’re creating. The API uses HTTP, which means software engineers (and other writers) effectively have the freedom to use the application environment and libraries of their own choice.

Kuma itself is an open source platform written by Mozilla in Python, using the Django framework. Contributors can fork the Kuma repository on Github, make changes to the content, and push the revised content back to the wiki.

It will be interesting to see if this succeeds, and if this type of platform extends further out than its use for developer documentation.

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